00:09Hello, Ben Mankiewicz here for the final Wednesday night in July
00:12with the movies of Gary Cooper.
00:14He's been TCM's Star of the Month.
00:17Up next, a terrific screwball comedy from a director
00:20who helped perfect the genre, Howard Hawks.
00:23From RKO Pictures in 1941, Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck star in Ball of Fire.
00:28Cooper plays Professor Bertram Potts,
00:31a conservative and somewhat socially stunted academic
00:35who hangs out with seven older fellow professors.
00:39They're all in the process of writing a vast encyclopedia.
00:43Bertram's specialty is language, grammar,
00:46and he discovers their research is seriously lacking
00:49in regard to understanding the slang words of the day.
00:52So Bertram makes it his mission to learn the latest lingo firsthand,
00:57and that takes him to a lively nightclub where he meets a saucy performer
01:02with an all-time great movie name, Phyllis Diedrickson,
01:07who's planning to murder the guy who runs the nightclub for his insurance money.
01:11You know, I once again have the wrong Barbara Stanwyck movie.
01:15This isn't double indemnity,
01:16and Phyllis Diedrickson is a terrible femme fatale name.
01:20Phyllis Diedrickson is the name of the femme fatale's aunt.
01:25In Ball of Fire, Stanwyck is Sugarpuss O'Shea.
01:30That's a name.
01:31Anyway, Bertram finds Sugarpuss entangled in some messy business
01:35with her gangster boyfriend, played by Dana Andrews,
01:38which lays the groundwork for Sugarpuss to hide out
01:41with the unsuspecting professors.
01:44Ball of Fire has the same screenwriters,
01:46Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett,
01:48as tonight's first feature, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife.
01:51They took inspiration from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
01:55making it a comedy with a crew of nutty professors
01:58standing in for Doc, Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful, Prancer,
02:04Comet, and Blitzen, or whatever their names are.
02:07Producer Samuel Goldwyn had Gary Cooper under contract,
02:09but resented that Coop only seemed to make a hit movie
02:13while loaned out to other studios.
02:16Goldwyn arranged to borrow Wilder and Brackett from Paramount
02:20to cook up this Cooper feature,
02:22helping to turn it into a bona fide moneymaker.
02:25And ironically, while Goldwyn concerned himself
02:28with making an in-house hit for Cooper,
02:31Cooper was on loan to Warner Brothers making the film
02:35that earned him his first Academy Award,
02:38Sergeant York, a movie that shares this film's director,
02:41Howard Hawks.
02:43From RKO in 1941 with cinematography from Greg Toland,
02:47fresh off Citizen Kane,
02:49also with Oscar Homolka, Dan Duryea,
02:53and big band drummer Gene Krupa.
02:55This is Ball of Fire.
